Harrington Speaker

I am a Psychology major here at BW, and today I had the opportunity to have breakfast and lunch with the 2013 Harrington Speaker, Dr. Melba Vasquez. Every year the Psychology department brings in a distinguished professional in the field to come and give a series of talks to the students and faculty at Baldwin Wallace. I was very excited to be able to speak with Dr. Vasquez for a number of reasons however, I was most excited to be able to hear her speak about leadership, and more specifically females in leadership roles.

Currently I am in the process of writing my capstone Female Leaders in the Professional Field, this capstone is for my Leadership Studies minor. My capstone is focusing on the challenges that women face as leaders in professional fields especially ones that are male dominated, and what type of leadership styles are used by these women. One of the talks that Dr. Vasquez gave was titled Multicultural Feminist Leadership: Benefits for All, this talk was extremely interesting to me because it touched on many topics that I hope to cover in my capstone such as potential reasons why women are underrepresented in leadership roles and ideas for how this disparity can be addressed in the future. I gained lots of knowledge today and really enjoyed hearing Dr. Vasquez speak about something that was so interesting and relevant to me. The legal field is traditionally dominated by men, and while this is changing being a female in this field will likely still present me with challenges in the future. I hope that through my capstone project I will be able to learn more about the differing styles of leadership that have been effective in the past and attempt to see what will be effective in the future.